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Macros, tips, and templates for Corel® WordPerfect® for Windows®
© Copyright 1996-2024 by Barry MacDonnell. All Rights Reserved.

A macro to toggle table gridlines and screen colors on and off. It helps you see what the printout will look like (especially when using reversed white-on-black text). It is more useful than you might imagine.

However, while the macro works in all versions of WPWin since WP6.1, recent versions (WordPerfect 8 and later) have a toggle button available (see below).

Background information:

There often is some confusion concerning the distinction between table gridlines and table borders, (not to mention table guidellines) what they do, and how they work. The following applies to WP8/9/10 (and possibly WP7).

1. Table gridlines -- the faint gray dotted lines on your screen -- can be toggled on/off with Tools, Settings, Display, Document tab, Show Table Gridlines. They are available to help you see the table's structure on the screen, so you know where to insert material in specific cells and guide you in formatting row and column sizes, etc. They never print. They are similar to the faint gray page margin guidelines in this respect (page margins do not print, they just show onscreen).

2. Table borders and individual cell borders can also be toggled on/off by right-clicking inside the table and selecting Borders/Fill. They print if they are toggled on (which is the default for cell lines; to change default borders and cell line settings, set them to your preferences and use the Default Settings button under the Table tab).

3. Unfortunately, you can see only one or the other onscreen at a time: If table gridlines are set "on" -- which is sometimes the case, depending on the setting in Tools, Settings, Display, Document tab, Show -- you can't see table borders or cell lines (if they are on). Gridline display takes precedence over table border or cell line display. You have to toggle gridlines "off" so that you can see the table borders or cell lines onscreen the way they will print. In WP8/9/10 (and perhaps in WP7) you can add a "toggle" button to your toolbar to do this instead of using this macro. It's now a standard feature in the Toolbar Editor, under View, Table Gridlines. Toggling also lets you see any "fills" such as reversed backgrounds, where the background is black or some dark color and the text is white or light colored.

Here's what WP9/sp4's Help says about table gridlines:

"Table gridlines are dimmed, dotted lines that replace [visible] lines and fill in a table. Table gridlines speed up the display of a document that contains many tables or heavily formatted tables. However, tables print with the lines and fill styles you have selected. You can choose to always display table gridlines."

These days with fast and powerful computers, often with lots of RAM, there's probably little need for gridlines, which were designed to be helpful as described above. So you probably could keep these little helpers turned off. But leave guidelines for tables turned on, because if you remove all lines and fill from a table and have gridlines turned off, you won't be able to see the table's cell boundaries.

WP9's Help says this about guidelines:

"You can move guidelines in your document to reposition tables, margins, columns, headers, and footers. Guidelines must be visible in your document to move them." So they are little helpers, too -- but for a different purpose. (For tables, you must have a table on screen to see guidelines, and have table borders and cell lines turned off.) Most users can leave them on all the time, since they will not obscure any table borders or cell lines they may have turned on.